Ghosts are real
Imagine you’re lying in bed at night and you hear a sound—floorboards shifting, a cupboard creaking open, a breezing ruffling the curtain. A hyperreal being of the Ring and Casper the Friendly Ghost jump across the corner of the room. The thought flashes: a ghost. Instantly the familiar logic kicks in: whatever this thing is, it comes from outside. It’s intruding on me. It’s threatens me. It doesn’t belong to me. But why is it so easy to imagine the ghost out there rather than admit the noise is our own restless body, our own anxious mind, our own inner chaos leaking into the quiet?
Hegel once described what he called the “beautiful soul”—a person who maintains their purity only by refusing to see their own flaws. Instead of engaging with their contradictions, they externalise them, projecting dirt and imperfection onto the world. That’s the same move we make with ghosts: rather than recognise the restless tremor of our own psyche, we disavow it, dress it up in a spectral form, and assign it a place outside ourselves. The haunting begins with disowning what is already ours.
This is why so much of modern life feels haunted. Whole industries are built on the promise of cleansing us of what disturbs us: detox diets, juice fasts, silent retreats, rituals of self-purification. They all speak the same language—if only you expel the toxins, rid yourself of the dirt, confess your sins, you will find peace. But the more you try to rid yourself of chaos, the more it stalks you. The ghosts multiply because what we are trying to cast out is nothing other than ourselves.
But the logic doesn’t stop with the body or the self. The same ghost-hunting impulse animates whole societies. When nations grow restless with their own contradictions, when the messiness of modern life feels unbearable, they go searching for scapegoats. The “dirt” becomes the immigrant, the feminist, the trans person, the protester—anyone cast as a stain on the purity of the national body. The language of detox and cleansing mutates into nationalism: protect our way of life, secure the borders, purge the intruder. Even public health becomes spectral—anti-vaxxers imagine hidden toxins in vaccines, a corrupt foreign substance invading the body politic. But as with juice cleanses and miracle teas, the haunting only intensifies. The chaos was never imported. It was always already within. “The call is coming from inside the house…”
James Joyce had a word for this: chaosmos. Life is not neat order with chaos as an intruder—it’s a weave of the two. Creativity, freedom, desire: all of them spring from this interlacing of chaos and cosmos. To insist on pure order is to exile the very thing that makes life vibrant. Seen in this light, ghosts stop being intruders. They are fragments of our own life-force, misrecognised as foreign. We’ve mistaken our vitality for an enemy.
But ideology thrives on that mistake. It whispers that if you only eliminated the antagonism, if you only resolved the contradictions, then you would have the perfect object of desire, the clean slate, the happy ending.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan saw that what we treat as obstacles aren’t barriers to desire at all—they’re what keep it alive. Desire isn’t about reaching a contradiction-free state; it’s about circling the gap that never closes. That’s why so much of life feels haunted: I want to believe lying is always wrong, but I also know that sometimes it’s the only kind thing to do. I want to make every consumer choice to fight climate change, yet I still rely on shops enmeshed in the very system I oppose. If I could only get a holiday, a raise, or just some goddamn peace and quiet, then everything would fall into place. We long to resolve the tension, to step into a world scrubbed clean of contradiction. But take away the lack and desire itself vanishes. This is why Lacan urged us to “traverse the fantasy”—to stop dreaming of purity, and instead learn to live with the contradictions, even to take a strange pleasure in them. The ghosts belong here: they’re the return of what we disavow, the flaws and contradictions we try to banish, but they’re also what sustains our wanting, our drive and desire. Without them, life would be empty.
So maybe the sound at night really is a ghost—but not in the way we first thought. It isn’t a supernatural visitor come to disturb our peace. It’s the knock of our own chaos, reminding us that purity is an illusion, that order and disorder are interwoven, that desire feeds on antagonism. To live is to be haunted.
Which is why the task is not to exorcise our ghosts but to make peace with them, even walk beside them. Ghosts are real because they are us—our flaws, our contradictions, our vitality—returned in unfamiliar form. And if we are brave enough to wander with them, to stop banishing them to the shadows, we may find that what felt like a haunting was simply life itself, insisting on being lived.
Ghosts are real because we are haunted, and to be haunted is to be alive.